The Australian Outback electrified Second Chance with only four episodes.
(CBS)

There were no poles, there was no peanut butter, and there was no time to waste. Jeff Varner hit the beach of Survivor: Cambodia — Second Chancerunning at a speed that can only be described as “balls to the wall,” in his own words. But the tank finally ran out of gas and bit him in the you-know-what on Day 12.

Varner, easily the most electric personality of the season this side of Abi-Maria Gomes, burned big, bright and quick, flaming out after only four episodes. Perhaps there was a certain inevitability to the velocity of Varner’s exit, given the way his game began.

“It was like a bottle of champagne,” he tells me on the phone, the morning after his exit episode aired. “Somebody shook it up, put it on the beach, popped the cork, and out it came. I was not in control.”

Varner tells me he was emotional throughout his time on Survivor. “I cried a lot on camera,” he reveals. “Thank God they didn’t show it.” But they weren’t tears of sorrow or frustration. “I just had so much joy,” he says, and it had everything to do with connecting to the primal and spiritual nature of the situation.

“I believe that God speaks to us, through the Earth, through all kinds of things,” says Varner. “I’m in New York now, and there’s pavement, and it just sort of blocks it. But when you’re out there, and you’re barefoot and you’re on the Earth? I felt it.”

“I did that entire experience by my gut,” he continues. “I just felt it. The situation would tell me to go do this, go do that. If I needed to talk to somebody, I would just wake up in the middle of the night, and they’d be getting up to go pee. It was weird how things would just work. I told the producers I wasn’t even thinking anymore. I was just going to go with my soul. Every move I made was my gut instinct acting. My head had to catch up later. It got me into trouble sometimes, but I was able to talk myself out of it.”

When I met with Varner at Ponderosa on the day before Second Chance began, the man’s emotion was impossible to ignore. He spoke sharply and smartly about strategy in one breath, and then in the next, he talked about helping others and finding “good souls.” I asked him then if he thought his intense emotions would help or hinder his game. He did not have an answer at the time. He has an answer now.

“It was a great thing for my game,” he says, the hint of a smile in his voice. “I’m a very self-aware person. I’m an emotional person. Being able to recognize that about myself, and not be frightened by it, but to embrace it and use it as a tool, was just fantastic to me. I had no idea how landing on that beach would feel until I did it. It was overwhelming.”

Varner was all of the above, hitting the beach unwilling to lose on a tie again, fighting to win for his mother battling breast cancer back home (she is now cancer-free), and waging his own war against Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. But from the moment he cruised up to the marooning to the moment his torch went out, Varner did not feel the weight of his Survivor ghosts, or even his loved ones.

“I never thought about my family while I was out there,” he admits with his signature cackle. “I know that sounds horrible!”

Instead, he was thinking about someone else: You.

“Every step I took, I saw a viewer who voted for me. Everything was for them,” he says. “I’m so grateful for all the people. I played that game not to win, but to play for them.”

When you’re not playing to win, when you’re playing for the crowd, you get the explosive four-episode arc of Jeff Varner’s second chance — not that he didn’t have his cards set up in a winning position, at least at the start.

The gimmick behind Second Chance — fans voting 20 of their favorites back onto Survivor — provided viewers with an unprecedented opportunity to witness the game before the game began.

Every season featuring returning players comes equipped with at least some measure of internal conversations between the contestants in the weeks leading up to filming, but only Second Chance operated with every single Survivor fan knowing the names and faces in the mix.

For his part, Varner was very candid with me and other press members about his pre-game plots and plans in the days leading up to Second Chance, copping to his already established alliance with Terry Deitz, Kelly Wiglesworth, and the missing-in-action Shane Powers. Varner’s swagger in interviews electrified fans in the weeks leading up to the premiere, but now that he’s free to speak again, he describes the pre-gaming process as matter-of-factly as possible.

“Everybody pre-games, Josh. Let me tell you that,” he tells me. “When you’re in an all-star season, yes, it would be ideal to have a pure game where no one talks to each other. But everybody knows each other. You know of each other. They released our names early enough that it added a whole new layer to this game. It’s just the way it is.”

The way it shook out for Varner involved not only landing on the same Ta Keo tribe with Terry and Kelly, but with a whole mix of other players he either made arrangements with (see: Kelley Wentworth), had unspoken assumptions with (see: Vytas Baskauskas), and even some he wanted to kick off immediately. (Here’s looking at you, Young Lad. Mind the frame.) Varner felt the wrath of the Survivor gods from the moment he looked at his original tribe makeup.

“When I landed and told the press that I had these relationships, and all the sudden I ended up with everybody? To me, it was not a coincidence,” he laughs. “I felt like that was Probst saying, ‘Screw you, buddy! I’m gonna teach you a lesson!'”

At first, Varner was not pleased with the situation, due to his two closest allies. “I was committed to Terry and Kelly until the end,” he explains, “and they were not playing.”

“Kelly refused to play,” he continues. “It’s just not who she is. She’s just going to mother everybody and help everybody. Terry was sticking his foot in his mouth every five minutes the first three days. I was panicking. ‘I’m committed to these people, and they suck! What am I going to do?’ Shirin is grabbing me, and I decided organically that what I’m going to do is teach them a lesson. I’m going to vote for Vytas, then wake them up and shock them and kick their ass in the morning. And that worked. It really worked.”

It also worked out, at least originally, that Varner found an unexpected ally in Abi-Maria, a lightning rod of controversy during the early days of Ta Keo.

“I needed a shield, and there she was,” he says. “I saw Abi as a tool to get Terry on his feet and playing. I sort of facilitated that. When you see Abi and Terry having their little conversation on the beach, you can see in the background somebody is laying on the beach five feet away. It’s me! When they finished their conversation, I went up to Abi and said, ‘I heard that. I have a brilliant idea. See me first thing in the morning.’ And first thing in the morning, she came down to the beach, and we had that whole sepia-toned conversation. Abi was a way to wake up Terry. She was a shield. She was everything.”

“The secret to Abi, for anyone who plays with Abi in the future, is to be her friend and be her confidant and shower her with everything her little insecure heart needs,” he continues. “When she gets crazy and starts pissing everybody off, she will not aim it at you. It worked beautifully.”

On the seventh day of Second Chance, Survivor history was made, and Varner’s story started spinning out of his control.

At first, things were not so bleak. Ta Keo and Bayon were split up into three new configurations, and Varner landed on Angkor, the 100th tribe in Survivor lore, and the only tribe in the game with a Ta Keo majority.

“I was thrilled,” Varner says about how he felt when he drew the yellow buff. “It was four against two. Yee-haw yay! I have Abi and she loves me, I have Peih-Gee and she loves me, I have Woo and I think he loves me. I’m thinking, ‘We’re good!'”

Of course, that’s before Varner learned about the conditions at Angkor, a beach with a bleak food situation, incredibly rough terrain (according to my conversation with Peih-Gee and backed up by Varner), and the need to build shelter all over again.

What’s more, Varner did not exactly get along with the two former Bayons on his tribe, Andrew Savage and Tasha Fox: “They made Angkor so much worse than the situation had to be. So much worse.”

“Andrew just followed Tasha around and did whatever she told him to do,” he says. “The show’s making it look like Andrew’s the boss, but Tasha ran everything. I don’t remember Andrew being strategic at all.”

But Varner’s impressions of Tasha and Savage formed before they ever exchanged a word, all thanks to one person: Kimmi Kappenberg. We never saw the two Australian Outback veterans play together on screen, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

“Kimmi, who was on the mat next to me [during the swap], took her buff out of the box, and she sort of tossed her box at my feet. I love her for that. That was such a sly move you didn’t see,” he remembers. “When she did that, I dropped my box at my feet, too. She reached over to pick hers up, and when I went down to pick mine up, she whispered in my ear: ‘Don’t trust Andrew. He can’t keep his mouth shut.'”

Thanks to that tip, Varner’s first order of business upon arriving at Angkor was sizing up his new bunkmates.

“When we got to Angkor, I made a beeline for Andrew and Tasha,” he says. “I said, ‘I’m open to working with you. Let’s figure it out. Andrew, tell me everything you know.’ And he spilled all the beans. Andrew and Tasha were really the rats, because they ratted out everything going on with their alliance, who’s on the top and who’s on the bottom.”

With all the dirt on Bayon now firmly under his buff, Varner formulated a plan of attack: “I got with our Ta Keo Four and said, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do. Let’s vote out Tasha because she’s such a mean, nasty person.’ Because the show is not showing who Tasha is, or who I remember Tasha to be. ‘When we do, I will tell everybody on all the mats everything I know: Here’s what Tasha told me.’ I had this whole thing planned.”

As we saw, Ta Keo did not stick to the plan. “The problem is, Abi actually flipped,” says Varner, “which threw everything into a tizzy.”

That was the first problem. The second problem? Varner’s commitment to his pre-game partners.

“So when I’m at that challenge, because I love Kelly and I’m committed to the Nth degree to Kelly and Terry, I’m mouthing to her everything I know,” he says. “‘Stick with this one, go with this one, this one’s on the bottom, this one’s on the top.’ The show didn’t show it, because the show hasn’t shown that alliance situation yet, but Tasha heard it and called me a rat. It pissed me off, because I wasn’t being a rat. I looked at her and said, ‘You want a rat, [expletive]? I’ll show you a rat.’ I went on with that speech that I had planned… and it was ugly.”

Indeed it was, but what happened next was beautiful: Varner somehow managed to survive the upcoming Tribal Council without receiving a single vote. The show depicted Varner as sleeping through the afternoon leading up to the vote, but Peih-Gee gave the man credit for saving his own skin, and Varner doubles down on the claim.

“What I don’t like about the editing is they made it look like I went back to Angkor and went to bed,” he says. “All of that — Peih-Gee going to Abi and going to Tasha, and Tasha going to Abi — that’s a wheel that was turning because I went up to the well and turned it.”

But you can only turn the wheel so much before it pops off, and that’s exactly what happened in the three days following Peih-Gee’s departure. Angkor won a big food reward thanks to Savage, but it wasn’t enough to propel the tribe to an immunity victory. Varner spent the afternoon doing his best to work on Abi, Tasha and Savage, and continued the case at Tribal Council later that evening — but he already knew his goose was cooked.

“I was gone,” he says. “I knew I was gone. It was clear to me. I fought anyway, because that’s who I am, and because I was playing for viewers and not for me. But I knew I was gone.”

Varner didn’t need to look inside his gut to know he was toast, either. All he had to do was look down at his foot.

The truly brutal nature of Survivor is often lost in translation from reality to television. Case in point: Varner suffering an injury to his foot during the fateful blindfold immunity challenge.

“They minimized that injury quite a bit with the editing, like it was a little bump on the foot and that was it,” he says. “But the doctors told me they thought it was broken. My toe was black. The toenail just fell off last week. I was on crutches for two and a half weeks after. They took me to the hospital when I got to Ponderosa. My foot was swollen.”

And that’s what happened once Varner was out of the game. Inside the game, on his final day, Varner rested on the beach, unable to walk around on the foot. “I literally laid there all day because I was in such pain, and they don’t give you any meds or anything.”

On the off chance that Varner actually survived the impending vote, then, his description of his foot indicates he wasn’t long for the game anyway. (In this alternate universe, Varner could have gone the way of another legendary pre-merge Survivor narrator: Jonathan Penner, evacuated from Season 16due to complications of a knee injury.) Varner certainly feels it would have taken him a while to recover.

“It would have taken me a minute. It was bad,” he says. “Really bad. The people who were with me at Ponderosa — the handlers, the doctors and stuff — they know how bad it was. I was living it, and it was ugly.”

At that point, whatever loyalty he created with Abi was out the window. “My injury made it easy for her.” Still, Varner credits Abi with destroying his game — and he himself takes ownership over that outcome.

“Abi bombed my game, and that’s my fault,” he tells me. “I don’t blame Abi. I don’t hate on Abi. She had the choice of Tasha and Andrew and something she didn’t know, or Woo and Peih-Gee, who had already fought with her and tried to vote her out. Abi did what Abi needed to do, and Abi told me out there on the beach, ‘Here’s what I’m doing.’ She was loyal to me, up to that point. I wish she had been more loyal and said, ‘I’m not going to vote for Jeff. Let’s do something else.’ But she didn’t.”

There were other bumps and bruises along the way, crossroads Varner wishes he could revisit. Instead of voting for Peih-Gee, for example, Varner now feels he should have voted with her and forced a tie against Savage, Tasha and Abi — but ties were out of the question, except for the one around his neck, given the way Varner lost Survivor the first time.

“I didn’t even think about it,” he says. “I had blocked the whole tie situation out and was not going into a tie with Vytas in the beginning. I was not going into a tie. It just wasn’t something I was going to do. But in hindsight, I should have done that. In our pre-jury trip, Peih-Gee and I talked about that a lot. I wish I had done that. If I could Quantum Leap back into my body, that’s what I would do. Maybe it would have gotten rid of Tasha or Andrew.”

But there’s no turning back the clock. Whatever happened, happened. Varner moves forward now with his head held high, and even though he went out fourth, he feels like he accomplished his mission.

“I felt the pressure,” he says. “We have the distinct disadvantage of being the only cast in the history of this show chosen by viewers. Some people just sat on their ass and tried to look cute on camera and never get any airtime, and for me, I wanted to give back to the people who gave me this second chance. I wanted to play for 15 years, and it just poured out of me in ways that I can’t explain.”

These days, Varner feels fantastic. His foot has healed. He wants to bring fans and friends back to Cambodia, to visit the land that changed his life. He’s pursuing new opportunities. He’s walking into the unknown.

“I got home and felt like I came back to somebody else’s life,” he says. “It’s weird. There are great things ahead for me. I don’t quite know what they are, but I have this momentum and this energy that’s pushing me forward. That’s just the way it’s going to be. But I don’t know. That’s the beauty of being on a quest. You don’t know where you’re headed.”

Who knows? Maybe he’s headed for a third chance at Survivor. Several fans, yours truly included, would love to see that. So would Varner.

“Going 15 years and not playing was a disadvantage. It was all emotional. There was a lot going on,” he says. “Now that it’s fresh in me, I would have a very different approach. You play the way the people you’re playing with dictate you play, if that makes any sense. That game moves as fast and as hard as the one person who picks it up and moves it. You either go with them, or you don’t. How would I play it again? I’m not sure. I can’t be somebody I’m not. You’d get the same person, I’m sure. But the pre-gaming and all that stuff, I would have a very different approach…”

“…he says, pre-gaming in public,” I respond, putting him on.

Varner pauses for a second, and when he speaks again, I can’t tell if he’s asking an honest question, or if he’s putting me on: “Am I pre-gaming in public?”

Josh Wigler is a writer, editor and podcaster who has been published by MTV News, New York Magazine, Comic Book Resources, Digital Trends and more. He is the co-author of The Evolution of Strategy: 30 Seasons of Survivor, an audiobook chronicling the reality TV show’s transformation, and one of the hosts of Post Show Recaps, a podcast about film and television. Follow Josh on Twitter @roundhoward.

Visit Parade.com every Thursday for exit interviews with the Survivor: Cambodia – Second Chance cast, and click here to read all of our preseason and ongoing coverage.Click the gallery below to meet all the new castaways!

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